Editorial: Tea party isn’t going away soon

True grassroots movements in politics are rare these days. The electorate is sampled, focused, messaged and hit with a ground game. Candidates are packaged and sold based on the results of increasingly sophisticated marketing studies and strategies.

That is why the tea party movement continues to confound political insiders. A week later, they are still all scratching their heads about how economics professor David Brat, with a campaign treasury of less than a quarter of a million dollars, could defeat — nay, trounce — House Majority Leader Eric Cantor with a $5.7 million war chest in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District.

A few weeks earlier, conventional wisdom gave the tea party up for dead. Establishment Republicans who were expected to face tough outsider challenges cruised to victory. Republican insiders tugged at their suspenders and smugly noted that everything was under control. Democrats, who love labeling the tea party faithful as “crazies,” jumped up and down and proclaimed that establishment Republicans had only won because they adopted tea party ideology.

Then along came the Cantor shocker. Thought to be untouchable, the majority leader got clobbered by 11 percentage points.

What happened? That question hasn’t fully been answered yet. But all politics is local, and buried somewhere in that adage is likely to be the answer.

As for the tea party movement, news of its demise was greatly exaggerated. The great thing about the tea party is that it makes such liars out of Washington insiders, who claim to want ordinary people involved in politics but shriek like a barefoot damsel treading on an adder when they actually come face to face with the real thing.

The tea party movement is everything Washington insiders hate. It is chaotic, disruptive, unpredictable and principled. It isn’t interested in helping the government run smoothly, because it doesn’t believe government is the answer to the country’s problems.

Love it or hate, it but don’t expect it to go away anytime soon.

A version of this editorial first appeared in the Tuscaloosa News, a Halifax Media Group newspaper.